Skull Fossil Suggests Simpler Human Lineage

Lauren Gray

Wilford, John N. "Skull Fossil Suggests Simpler Human Lineage." Nytimes.com/. New York Times, 17 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/science/fossil-skull-may-rewrite-humans-evolutionary-story.html

For years, scientists have found remains of species that are believed to be part of the human’s evolutionary line. Each new skeletal piece is has been believed to be a completely different species. Now, after studying a new skull that was discovered 8 years ago, this theory appears to be inaccurate. A new theory has surfaced that, just like humans, species of hominids can each have individual bone structure and facial features. The skull was discovered in Dmanisi in Georgia along with 4 other hominid skulls. These skulls were believed to belong to the same species of hominid, the differences between them were “no more pronounced than those between any given five modern humans” (pg 1).

This new skull has “primitive features: a long, apelike face, large teeth and a tiny braincase, about one size of that of a modern human being.” (pg 1) These features were unlike those of previously discovered. The size of the braincase disproved some theories that hominids needed a large brain to get out of Africa. The 5 skulls are believed to belong to the Homo evolutionary line, possibly Homo habilis or early Homo erectus. The skull discussed in this article is the most complete early Homo skull ever found.

The circumstances under which the skulls were discovered us also gives us clues into the lives of these hominids. They were discovered in caves, believed to have been dragged there as the pray of some large animal, such as a saber-toothed cat or a giant leopard. This means that early Homos had to live in fear of these animals, as prey rather than predators.

The discovery leads to many incites into evolution and the way that scientists study new specimens. For example, these skulls were discovered together. If they had been discovered in varying locations scientists might have pronounced them as being different species, but because they were found together they have been classified as being the same. This idea of varying facial features in hominids can rewrite the entirety of human evolution. Our evolutions could be much simpler than scientists previously anticipated. This particular skull shape also provided information about the amount of intelligence for the migration of our ancestors. It is interesting how one little skull can change the entire course of years of research.

I thought that this article was a great source of facts about the progression of our understanding of evolution, but some things were a bit lacking. I would have liked to have read more about what the previous theories were and why. I also thought that this article was very jumbled and covered a lot of topics in such a short article. I had to read it more than twice to fully understand it. The author jumped between topics a lot. I think that the author could have written this article in a much more organized fashion that didn’t make me feel like I was playing mental hopscotch. I liked the concept, which is what drove me to choose this article, despite how confusing it was to read.

Extra Gene Makes Mice Manic

“Extra Gene Makes Mice Manic”

Article: Mascarelli, Amanda. "Extra Gene Makes Mice Manic: Scientific American." Extra Gene Makes Mice Manic: Scientific American. Nature Magazine, n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.

                  In a decade in which people, especially kids, are being diagnosed more than for attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) it is very crucial to learn of all the possible causes for neuropsychiatric disorders such as ADHD, epilepsy, and schizophrenia. One possible cause for cases of these particular neuropsychiatric disorders can be traced to missing or altered of a gene called SHANK₃. SHANK₃ is a gene that helps to make sure messages are relayed properly between cells. In many cases, people with ADHD have a wider region the SHANK₃ gene. Huda Zoghbi, a neurogeneticist at Baylor College of Medicine, wanted to obtain a better grasp on the role of SHANK₃, so he and his colleagues created mice with duplicate copies of the gene. According to Zoghbi, “the mouse was remarkably hyperactive, running around like mad.” He also reported that the mouse did not respond to medications that are typically used to treat ADHD. After trying various treatments, a drug called valproate remarkably reversed the psychiatric effects the mouse was experiencing. These results prove that the excess SHANK₃ proteins that cause some psychiatric disorders can be effectively treated, furthering scientists diagnosis of a very common issue at this time.

                  Even though these tests just show results of a mouse, the excess protein caused by a mutated SHANK₃ gene is a common cause for ADHD in people today. Also, previously many cases of ADHD have inexplicably not responded to common treatments. However, the discovery that valproate can reverse the effects of ADHD when the root cause is a mutation of the SHANK₃ gene is very important to treating cases of ADHD. Along with ADHD, neuropsychiatric conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, and Asperger’s,  three very serious conditions of the mind, epilepsy causing seizures, schizophrenia causing very real hallucinations, and Asperger’s syndrome resulting in extreme memory loss, can be traced back to mutations of the SHANK₃ gene. Hopefully the diagnosis of the “manic mouse” will help to further scientists’ treatments of a few very serious brain disorders that have greatly affected the lives of many people.

This article shows many important discoveries made and shows possible treatments for very dangerous conditions, and even though it overall is a very strong article, there are still weaknesses that, if fixed, could have helped this article present a more effective read. First of all, the title does not closely describe what the article is about. It infers that the article will be about a mouse that has an extra gene that makes it act crazy, while it really is about a scientist using gene duplication on a mouse to further knowledge on a few neuropsychiatric conditions. On the contrary, the article does a great job explaining the causes and effects of a topic that most people do not know too much about. The article is very informative about a topic that is sometimes hard to fully grasp. Overall, I think this article was an easy read and it effectively informs the reader of a hard topic to understand.

"Help for the Child with Autism"

“Help for the Child With Autism”

Lange, Nicholas, and Christopher J. McDougle. "Help for the Child with Autism" Scientific American Oct. 2013: 72-77. Print.

Jayden Hannon was diagnosed with autism when he was 22 months old. Autism is a disorder of brain development that can be characterized by: difficulties in social interactions, verbal or non-verbal communications, and repetitive behaviors. Autism can be treated a number of ways. Jayden goes through intensive therapy to improve his communication skills, but scientists have yet to pinpoint the cause of autism. They believe it could be a molecule, a gene, brain size, or an electrical activity in the brain circuit. Yet, Jayden’s future, like all other autistic children, is looking up with new advances in research and therapies.

            The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends examining all children between 18-24 months for early telltale signs of autism. The earlier ASD is caught, the earlier it can be treated and improved, due to massive brain developments that occur at a young age. One of the most effective ways to treat autism is with ESDM, which is a type of therapy. This therapy draws the attention on the having the child understand social cues: facial expressions, gestures, and words spoken. ESDM, along with other therapy approaches, try and draw the child’s attention to faces and voices. ESDM had proven effective, with their children scoring higher on cognitive tests, and paying more attention to faces than other autistic children. Also children, who received ESDM, had the regular brain responses of a typical four-year old. Children that had ESDM had more brain areas activate when they saw a face, than other autistic children. These changes happened after 2,000 hours of therapy, but those hours were worth the work, because it clearly made improvements.

Though there is no drug to directly treat autism, oxytocin, or the “cuddle chemical” has been proven to reduce the effects of autism. Oxytocin basically is a hormone that is naturally in a human’s body, and it allows a person to trust others, develop relationships, and pick up moral clues. For example, a child with autism cannot distinguish if a stranger is good or bad, but oxytocin allows them to detect the difference. Also people with autism have fewer oxytocin receptors, which decreases the level in their body. Yet, there is not enough evidence to show that oxytocin can become a routine part of treatment.

Some researchers believe that genetic mutations could be rooted in the effects and cause of autism. There is evidence showing that people with autism have mutated genes in common, which others do not have. Other researchers have been manipulating stem cells, to see if they could become brain cells, which would help in the diagnosis and treatment of ASD. With research like this, doctors may be able to prescribe medicines, treat, or cure the effects of autism.

The diagnosis of Autism Spectrum disorder has grown 10% to 17% annually in the last few years. More and more people have developed autism, and it affect roughly 2 million Americans. Researchers believe because Autism is developed at such an early age, it can be treated effectively if they could pinpoint what causes it. A combination of genetic and behavioral therapies could essentially reshape the nervous system at a cellular and molecular level improving the effects of autism. If that worked, we could say we are nearing a cure for autism, so children like Jayden do not have to live with it anymore.

This article makes some very interesting points. It used statistics, which I liked because they helped me further comprehend the research. But during some parts, the article became repetitive, and hard to comprehend. The authors could have rephrased some of their points to make it more straightforward. But overall this piece really touched on the recent discoveries in autism, and was very informative.

No More Sharks in the Great Blue Sea

Gage Bellitto

Lippsett, Lonny. "An Ocean That's No Longer Wild." : Oceanus Magazine. N.p., 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/an-ocean-thats-no-longer-wild

No More Sharks in the Great Blue Sea

                Where are all the sharks going? Most of them are ending up in bowls of soup because of the high demand for shark fin soup in Asia. Sharks are a dying species, and they need our help staying alive. It is estimated that 100 million sharks are killed every year – most of them just for their fins, and their bodies are thrown overboard like trash. Sharks have sustained life for a long time now, even though it takes years for them to reproduce. Radical shift in the industrial fishing, however, changed all of that, and the sharks simply can’t keep up.

                What do we really know about sharks? Surprisingly, not that much, which poses a great problem in that we don’t know how they function in our ocean ecosystems and we have no idea how the decreasing population will affect the rest of the ecosystem. Observing sharks is not like watching a goldfish swim in its little bowl.  It is much more difficult; the ocean is a big and mysterious place and trying to keep eyes on a shark is not a walk in the park. Some questions that are still unanswered are where sharks spawn, where they pup, what they eat, how old they get, and where juveniles, females, and males go to at different times of the year?

In order to answer some of these questions and to obtain knowledge that will be critical to conserve some of the apex predators that we have left, the WHOI Fish Ecology Lab’s TOTEM (Tagging of Oceanic Teleost and Elasmobranch Megafauna) Project was founded. The piece of equipment that is vital to not only this project but to other sea life organization as well is the PSAT (pop-up satellite archival transmitting) tags. These $4,000 tags are inserted into the muscle tissue just below the dorsal fin. After months and months of the tag collecting data, the tag would release and float to the surface of the water. After floating to the top via antenna the tag would send information such as, temperature, depth, and light levels of the waters the fish swam in. This data gives a good three-dimensional image of the shark’s movements. All the information gathered from these tags is used to plan strategy on ways to sustain the lives of these beautiful sharks.

Sharks are the lions of the oceans since they are the top predators. If the population of the sharks continues to decrease “it can increase the abundance of animals at the level below and reduce biodiversity down the line.” Diversity is part of every ecosystem, and if we want our oceans to stay the way they are, we need to protect the diversity. What would happen if the sharks were no more? Our most charismatic animals would be gone. Oceans would no longer be as wild, and a whole new environment would develop.

               There is an increased emphasis in the world to learn more about nature and how we can help it to thrive forever.  The scientific study of the sharks can be a model for the study of other species in the future.  By using the new technologies of science to explore and answer questions about nature, we may be able to save many species from extinction, and, instead, learn ways to help them to thrive.

                I feel that this article did a great job of portraying the main point that they wanted to get across, and at the same time made it interesting and understandable to the reader. I appreciated how they broke down the article into subsections, and each subsection asked a new question. It was very interesting to learn about how the population of sharks affects the rest of the ocean, and how we are trying to obtain more information about them. However, I do think that the writer could have expanded more on some of the information; I felt that, at times, a minimum of information was given, when more could have been said.  The author could have written about how the invention of tags came about and how people went about finding sharks in the ocean.  What interesting information that would have been! Even though the author could have expanded his information more, nevertheless, he did a fantastic job at making the article fun to read and in stating all of his points in a straight forward way.

With the increase in technology like the invention of tags we are able to begin to answer some of the mysterious questions that wait for us beneath the ocean sea. How many white sharks are there? What exactly do those white sharks do down there? How often do they return? We don’t know everything about these creatures, but we are starting to become more familiar with these animals, more than ever before. Hopefully, with new information like this, we can start to think of strategies to save these magnificent animals. Yet, the question that no one knows the answer to is how much time do we really have?   

 

 

An Ocean That's No Longer Wild

Jason Cushman

Lippsett, Lonny. "An Ocean That's No Longer Wild." : Oceanus Magazine. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013. <https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/an-ocean-thats-no-longer-wild>.

 
Summary:          
         There are around 500 species of sharks in the world’s oceans, and this number may start to drop.  In many Asian countries, there is a large demand for sharkfin soup.  About 100 million sharks are killed per year, and most of the shark is wasted.  The fins are cut off, and the body thrown back into the sea.  This is a very large waste, and is harming the ocean’s ecosystem.  Being at the top of the food chain, sharks are not evolved to have to deal with large predators, and are not able to reproduce as fast as an animal that is.  They are rapidly dying, and scientists at places like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are attempting to help them.  The big problem being we don’t know a lot about them.  They can be hard to find, and because of this, and the fact that they are always underwater, we can’t even figure out the basics like their population size, and mating spots.  In order to start finding information, scientists are tagging animals.  They plant a tag into muscle tissue below the dorsal fin of certain fish, or sharks.  They are programmed to release from a fish usually after a year, and during this period it collects depth, temperature, and light level data.  When the tags release, they float to the surface and connect to a satellite to give the information back to the scientists.  These tags have been very effective at collecting large amounts of data so far.  
 
Relevance:
         This is relevant to humanity because many people rely on fish for a living.  If we cannot collect enough data fast enough, then many different species of sharks could die out, and this would have a major negative effect on the marine ecosystem, and food chain.  Without sharks, other fish would overpopulate the oceans, and cause problems for other marine life too.  If there are too many of one fish, they could start killing other fish and causing major problems for humans.  Fish is a major source of food, and without a lot of fish many people will starve, and die.  This is also a problem for humanity because we created the problem, and it is our job to fix it.  
 
Critique:
         I thought the author, Lonny Lippsett, did a very good job at providing the reader with a sufficient amount of information to understand what was happening, and why, while keeping it clear and concise.  She used a ask and answer format which was a very good way of communicating the information to the reader.  There were plenty of details and numbers, and it was easy to understand.  I would have liked this article more if the reader had included more details about the data that was collected by the tags, and how this data is being examined.  It would have been very helpful to understand what was being done with the data, and how we can help.  

                

The Surprising Origins of Life's Complexity

Article:

Zimmer, Carl . "The Surprising Origins of Life's Complexity." Scientific AmericanAug. 2013: 84-89. Print.

            Out of the many theories of evolution, Darwin’s theory of natural selection is one of the most supported theories of evolution today. Darwin’s theory, in simple words, is the passing down of traits that help a species survive in the wild. For example, birds with long beaks survived because they were able to get more food, than birds of the same species with shorter beaks. Just as organisms can evolve, so can their complexity, from a simple origin to a complex being.

            The definition of complexity in organisms is considered to be a vast variety of different building blocks. For example, our bodies are made up of 100 trillion cells, each of those cells are different. Therefore, we can say that we are more complex than other animals, like sponges. Complexity increases as time goes by, either developing into useful traits, or causing a bad mutation. Natural selection does its job here, passing down useful traits, but also preventing useless mutations from continuing, therefore only slightly increasing the levels of complexity. This has caused many scientists such as Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon to believe that complexity can increase in the absence of natural selection.

            McShea and Leonore Fleming observed fruit flies that lived and bred in laboratories. According to the zero-force evolutionary law, these flies would be more complex than wild ones, because natural selection would not stop mutations from passing down. Their hypothesis turned out to be true, and the experiment supported the law. However, there are many critics suggesting that adult flies that died from mutations in the lab before, were not taken into account.

            Another theory suggests that some genes evolved neutrally or the constructive neutral evolution. In other words, the evolution of these genes does not have any effect on the organism. For example, the genes Vma11, present only in fungi, and the gene Vma3, in animals and fungi, have the common ancestor gene called Anc.3-11. Somewhere during evolution this gene must have split in two; an experiment shows that when Vma3 and Vma11 were removed in yeast and replaced with Anc.3-11, the yeast was still able to function fine. Other examples of neutral evolution include the development of the RNA-editing enzyme.

            These discoveries are important in the field of science because it encourages scientists to look beyond the current theories and try to develop their own. We can also learn how environment affects the evolution of animals. Similar to the fruit flies, humans in 1^st world countries are being fed and sheltered from the harms of nature, most of us don’t have to hunt or run away from predators for survival. Therefore could the development of non-nomadic people be different from that of nomads in Africa. If the same development were to occur in humans, as in what happened to fruit flies, could mutations develop making us more complex than those exposed to nature more. Ideas such as this can be developed based off the works of McShea, Brandon, Fleming and other scientists. In addition to scientific purposes, this article can let others understand and know more about evolution, complexity and how organisms are affected by these. 

            I thought this article was interesting and fascinating. It was not too long, and even with my basic knowledge of biology I was able to understand everything that was written. I especially liked how after every experiment the author, Carl Zimmer, described, added in the opinion of critics and facts that helped condemn the results of experiments. However, I wish there was more written on the experiments done on fruit flies. Zimmer does explain the results, hypothesis, and there is even a picture in the beginning of the article showing the differences of fruit flies, but I still wished there was more about the process of the experiment because it was interesting. This article would be more appealing if there was more emphasis on how this topic affects human life.

Marine Mammal Choir

Marine Mammal Choir

Thean, Tara. "Caller IDs for Whales." : Oceanus Magazine. N.p., 25 June 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013. https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/caller-ids-for-whales.

A Summary:

Marine mammal scientists have recently been collecting recordings of calls from whales, killer whales, dolphins, and many other marine mammals. They have been able to organize all of these calls into different call types, noticing many that were similar. This takes time and effort to be able to consume and organize all these different calls into their own categories.

Tara Thean got to experience this through a fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2012. She spent hundreds of hours over many weeks organizing 3,127 recordings on her own. A WHOI research specialist, Laela Sayigh and her colleagues from the University of St. Andrews took the task of coding 4,000 pilot whale calls into different categories through crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing took place Zooniverse, a science hub that asked the public to help classify galaxy images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope according to their shapes. The team realized they could do the same with the marine mammal sounds and decided to go along with the idea. This lead to the spawning of Whale FM (link). This is a website where literally they are asking people, “What are the whales saying?”

There was no need to gather up volunteers because people were instantly intrigued. After the fall of 2011, over 10,000 people have been going on this website, connecting whale sounds to others they found similar by putting a check next to them, or putting an “X” if they did find a similarity. All around the world, visitors have summed up to match 30 different whale calls per visit, categorizing almost 200,000 calls. The scientists believe that this could easily be a spot-the-difference game for people all around.

Early work suggests, that scientists will be able to automate the classification process through mathematical algorithms. Researcher Arik Kershenbaum is experimenting with human music recognition to codify dolphin whistles. Even advanced computers seem to have trouble categorizing the whistles and tend to lose all the subtle differences each recording seems to have. These forgotten features that computers seem to lose are extremely important because they are consistent.

Dolphins have small blips in their whistles from one year to the other and it seems the dolphins keep those blips n their whistles every year. The computer will often make the mistake of saying two whistles are coming from different dolphins, when really they are from the same one, just changed certain things about its whistle. Changes in the duration or looping. The dolphin might repeat its first whistle, make it one long whistle, or multi-loop it. The computer will take a 3-loop whistle and a 4-loop whistle from the same dolphin and say they are different dolphins.   

 People are much better and telling the differences and similarities in dolphin calls and both Scientist Tyack and Scientist Sayigh, are optimistic that humans are able to perform mathematical algorithms to categorize dolphin and any other marine mammal vocalization. A paper in 2001 called Animal Behavior by Brenda McCowan and Diana Reiss disagrees and says that human inspections of the vocalizations are subjective.

Six years later Sayigh was able to give a rebuttal on the debate saying that humans despite being a naïve judge can indeed sort out and group together dolphin whistles. In 2012, another study claimed to prove that people were accurately able to match vocalizations, 74% of the time.

At the end of the article you can take a look at different dolphin whistles and sort them out for yourself!

Relevancy:

            There are a couple of reasons why a person would think this could have relevance to society. I found this to be increasingly interesting to think not only does this contribute to the studies of marine mammal noises and communications, but also to therapeutic and psychological factors of the human mind. People were able to codify marine mammal calls better than an advanced computer. This shows relevance to society through how we communicate and how we can tell the difference between tones and duration. This happens everyday. We assume things about each other through the tone that we’re saying something in, or how long it takes us to say it. Because we practice this deducing skill everyday, we have an ability with codifying it in animals. This could eventually, in good time, lead to better communication with marine mammals, or maybe even other animals of different species. It seems like it could be a possible breakthrough. Studies have shown that dolphins are some of the smartest animals in the world; this clearly proves that and furthers the argument of how smart they really are. Dolphins might be used as something more than just test, but as devices for communication and further research on groups of dolphins together and their communication. Letting normal people sort out different recordings could also lead to more scientists. People easily get inspired. If they continue to go on the website to codify more and more dolphin whistles it could easily motivate them to contribute to this science department. From donating funds for more research, to becoming part of the team to test more experiments, it might just take one person to make an outstanding breakthrough in the marine world.

Critique:

            I have both positive and negative opinions on this article. I would love to start by saying that this was truly one of the only articles that really sucked me in from the beginning. It was a bore for me to read in anyway. In fact, I’m glad we had to do this current event because if not, I would have never had the motivation of finding this great article! The idea of being able to observe communication from a completely different life is fascinating beyond words.  The fact that scientist were able to record dolphins and whales making the sounds they make everyday and being able to depict their differences is a weird thing to reads at first. But as soon as they start explaining it more and elaborating on how it’s done and by what standards it’s being codified, it becomes really simple and fun. I actually did it myself. I listened to a few of the whale calls (link above) that were already sorted and didn’t feel the need to argue why one was grouped with the other three. It seems hard but it’s actually really easy to tell it’s coming from the same whale. I recommend you try it when you get the chance.

            Some more negative factors of the article was that I wish they went into more depth about the variations of the calls. Yes they did talk about it a little bit but the author was too vague for me and I felt I wanted more specification on how dolphin whistles and whale calls can be. It was like I was being lured into it but as soon as I am completely indulged in knowing more about something they said in the article, they immediately went to a different topic about it. This was a little irritating for me and I felt that the author should have been more consistent with telling the information instead of automatically going into an opinion the experiment. I also got a little zoned out when it talked about other papers that wrote based on the test that WHOI was doing. They lost me with the boring and usual comment, “This is isn’t true” that a couple of the papers wrote. I didn’t really care for the opinions as much as I cared for the actual process and the results that average people got while doing the sorting.

            I felt that they should have definitely been more consistent with what the different things you van look for in a marine mammal’s call and spent less time on the pessimistic views of other science papers. I’m not saying that they should have excluded outside opinions completely, just spent a lot less time on it and spent more time on the actual experience, the test, the research and all that.